Greedy
by Threepwillow
Summary: BASED ON "A VERY POTTER SEQUEL": Sirius feels right at home when the Sorting Hat puts him in Gryffindor, but Remus Lupin is weird and confusing, and Sirius needs some help from another enchanted magical accessory. :::RL/SB, Scarf of Sexual Preference:::


(**AN:** Someone at accio_rs_fics on LiveJournal seemed to desperately want some Remus/Sirius involving the Scarf of Sexual Preference, and because it was 1:30 in the morning, I mistakenly decided it would be a good idea for me to write it. This is what I kind of vomited up. XD)

_**Greedy**_

_Gryffindor. Gryffindor. Gryffindor._ Sirius just kept chanting it over and over in his head like a mantra. Gryffindor! Not Slytherin like every other Black had ever been. Not Ravenclaw like that pretty girl he'd seen on the train. And not Hufflepuff, whatever the hell that was. The Sorting Hat had nestled down onto his head and put him in _Gryffindor._ This year was gonna be interesting.

He wandered aimlessly through the first year Gryffindor boys' dormitory touching everything that glowed maroon and gold, running his lingering fingers across the curtains that hung around his bed, scuffing his feet across the thick carpet. It was so sudden, so bizarre not to be a Slytherin - he hadn't been prepared for it at all. Yet the instant the Hat had said it, nothing in the world had seemed to Sirius more _right_. He already felt like he had way more of a home in the mass of deep red than he'd ever had before.

"Hey man, what are you _doing_?" asked a voice from behind the bedcurtains that Sirius had just realized he was fondling. He jerked back and stepped away a couple feet, and the owner of the voice poked his head out from the curtains - a twiggy, messy-haired boy with thin glasses and a total Jew-nose. He gave Sirius a funny look.

"Sorry," Sirius said after a moment.

"Whatever, dude, just don't bother me, I just popped open a new bag of Red Vines." To prove a point, he jammed one in his mouth, and it hung there limply, the red of the candy blending in with the red of the rest of the room.

Sirius's eyes caught on it. "Ah, man, no problem, I'd hate to come between a guy and his Red Vines, considering they're like the best snack in the whole...world..."

A light flashed between them as they finally made eye contact, and then the Jew kid bounded to his feet and stuck out another Red Vine toward Sirius, whose mouth was open to accept it before he even realized what was happening, as though it were a motion they'd been acting out for years already, the most natural thing in the world.

He chewed off a bite of it, then stuck his other hand out. "Sirius Black."

The kid with the Red Vines shook it. "James Potter!"

"I think you mean 'new best friend,'" said Sirius, using it to pull him into a bro embrace.

"I think I do!" And he did, it turned out. Not only had Gryffindor House brought him a place he could finally truly call home, but it had brought him the best friendship of his lifetime. Sirius couldn't be more thrilled about the work the Sorting Hat had done.

But from another bed in the room, a weak voice called "I thought I was your best friend." And that was the first time Sirius Black met Remus Lupin.

-xxx-

So Remus was probably the weirdest kid Sirius had ever met.

For starters, he had this bizarro obsession with chocolate. For every pound of Red Vines Sirius ate Remus probably ate two pounds of chocolate. Yet he managed to stay trim and attractively thin on a regular basis, which was just fucking unfair, because even if it had taken him till fourth year Sirius had definitely built up the freshman fifteen or twenty. He also seemed to have this retarded idea that he knew a lot about Quidditch, never mind that James was a million times better than him and had actually made captain of the team, because James was totally awesome and Remus was just...weird. Remus would be lucky to even coach a peewee team someday, never mind actually getting a spot somewhere as a player.

And there was that whole part where he turned into a werewolf once a month down in the Shrieking Shack - definitely the stupidest, weirdest part of all of it.

But one Thursday evening, near the end of the year after everyone's exams were just about over, Sirius and Remus and James and this little fuckass kid Peter were all getting drunk together, and something about Remus struck Sirius as even weirder than the Quidditch thing or the chocolate thing or the werewolf thing, and that was the fact that he had never seen Remus with a girl.

"Seriously. Srrsly. Siriusly! ahaha," he slurred, doing his best not to dump the rest of the contents of the bottle in his hand all over Remus's pants. "Whatha hell is wrong with you?"

"Have you - " Remus swayed a little, wide green eyes crossing as he regrouped. "'vyou seen the girls on this campus? You find me one that doesn't look like a freaking swamp monster, then - then we'll see."

"...HEY!" shouted James, a little too loudly and way too late. "Whaddabout whaddabout whaddabout Lilllllyyy Evans?"

"He'd have to be _shtuuuupid_ to try to hit on Lily Evansh with you around, Jamesh," said Peter. "We shaw what you did to Ssshhhnnappi."

The memory of James's latest prank on Severus Snape - an overwhelming case of musical flatulence that hadn't worn off for close to a week - groggily resurfaced in their alcohol-addled minds, and all four of them began to laugh lazily. The night rolled on, and they got more and more wasted, but the little seed of thought had taken root at the back of Sirius's brain, and even after first Peter and then Remus had passed out on the carpet he was still kind of thinking about it, despite how drunk he was.

"Potter. Hey, Potter. Potter. Potter! Potter. Hey, Potter - "

"What do you _want_, Sirius?" said James, so loudly that Sirius was astounded that Remus and Peter didn't wake back up.

"Whatchoo think is really - rlly - really the deeeally with Lupin anyway though?" he said. "With no girls, 'n' stuff. I mean even Pitter - putter - Peter got that HJ from that slutty Ravenclaw."

"Dunno!" said James. "Maybe he's..." James's voice instantly dropped from its obnoxiously loud pitch to a tone so quiet that Sirius couldn't even hear it in his efforts toward secrecy.

"Maybe he's _what_?" said Sirius, leaning in closer.

James said it again. "_Gay_."

"WHAT?" said Sirius, and this time Peter did twitch back awake, mumbling something like "drug 'n' kill otters" before realizing he was face-first on the floor and at least attempting to sit back up. Remus lay still. "Whatchoo _mean_?"

"Like, queer. Like he likes dudes. Like he wants to get it up the butt reeeeaaalllly hard - "

"Yeah okay EW, James, ew," said Sirius, gagging into his Firewhiskey. "But you...rully - really think so?"

"Only one way to find out," James said, conspiratory again, in his tiny barely-there voice.

"Whazzat?" Sirius wanted to know.

"You gotta get the Scarf!"

"Of course," said Sirius and Peter at once. "The Scarf!" But then Sirius frowned and added "wait, what Scarf?"

"The Shcarf of Shexual Preferensh!" said Peter, catching on. "Shupposhedly it livesh along with the Shorting Hat up in Dumbledore'sh offish. If you could shneak in there and find it..."

"You'd have to be a Hufflepuff to find anything in that shitty mess Dumbledore calls his office!" James crowed. "You'd _never_ get it before you got caught by Dumbledore or Hagrid or someone and then you'd be effed, man."

But the little seed inside Sirius was feeding off the booze and lodging itself deeper, and at this rate, you'd need some kind of enchanted weedwhacker to get it uprooted.

-xxx-

By the start of sixth year, the seed had sprouted into a fucking bush, and things that had seemed weird before had begun to pale in comparison to the weirdness that came once puberty had mostly finished up. Everything that happened to the four of them - horrible or wonderful or somewhere in between - just seemed more and more absurd.

Horrible: Peter got hardcore rejected by a girl in Slytherin he'd confessed his love to, after harboring a pretty heavy crush on her for two years. Sirius had tried to be nice, but after a while he'd come to a conclusion, and the others had backed him up on it: you never tell a girl you like her, because it just makes you look like an idiot. They decided to adopt it as a hardfast rule for their lives, and Peter vowed to keep trekking forward, though the glares he was giving James every time he laughed at him about it were kind of creepy.

Wonderful: They started putting together their big clusterfuck project that they were calling the Marauders' Map, charting secret passageways and the movement of people around the whole Hogwarts castle. Peter got mad when James wouldn't let him include a tiny representation of a rocketship to this stupid place called Pigfarts, and Remus complained for weeks of how sore his hand was from drawing the thing, but for the most part it was pretty bitchin'. It sure made stealing food and booze from the kitchens a lot easier when they could see if someone was coming.

Horrible: Gryffindor lost the Quidditch cup their fifth year to _Ravenclaw_. How the fuck did that happen? Ravenclaws _cannot_ play sports. They only read books and they can't play sports, even if they were reading some kind of how-to-play-sports book. That shit was just ridiculous.

Wonderful: James finally got Lily Evans to go out on a date with him. As a bonus, it involved making Severus Snape look like the world's biggest wienerjacket, so even though James reaped most of the benefits, all four of them enjoyed themselves.

Horrible, and wonderful too, and absolutely _everything_ in between: Remus Lupin had somehow managed to come out of puberty looking really, really hot.

Sirius was still trying to wrap his brain around it. Was it the scruffy little mustache he was cultivating, which took him from boyish to manly in about three days of not shaving? Was it the fact that he still hadn't managed to put on any weight, and you could see every thin lanky muscle of his stupid werewolf ass lurking just below the skin? Sirius didn't know what it was, but he did know that _he_ was supposed to be the hot one that had mad game with the bitches, and now here Remus was attracting all sorts of attention right out from under his nose. Including - and here was the weirdest part, in typical totally weird Remus Lupin fashion - the attention, sometimes, of Sirius himself. More than anything, Sirius needed to find that damn Scarf. He had some _sorting out_ of his own to do.

"I need a distraction," he hissed to James and Remus at dinner one night in October of their sixth year. Peter was inexplicably absent, and as usual no one cared.

"Not that it matters, because you know I'll do it, but why?" asked James, munching on a Red Vine even as he twirled up a bite of spaghetti. It was gross but impressive the way James could put food away. Sirius was always amazed.

"Gotta get into Dumbledore's office," Sirius said, as casually as he could force his voice to be. Stupid sexy Remus still figured it out in less than two seconds.

"Oh my god, Sirius, you're not trying to get that stupid scarf _again_?" he demanded. "What do you need it so bad for, anyway?"

"I want to drop it onto Sour Grape's neck in the middle of the school and watch everyone point and laugh when it tells him he's going to die alone," Sirius cackled, though he refused to meet Remus's eye, or James's for that matter.

"Do you have something in mind?" said James.

"No, dumbass, or I'd be handling the distraction myself, wouldn't I?" said Sirius.

James laughed and passed him a Red Vine. "Fair enough. Not to worry, I've got a brilliant plan, _as usual_. As long as Lupin's up for it, of course."

"I dunno, James, I guess," he said. "But promise me, Sirius."

"Anything, Lupy," said Sirius, grinning wildly.

"Promise that if it doesn't work this time, you'll give up on this stupid Scarf of Sexual Preference thing. It's gotten you like eighty times more detention than even a delinquent like you deserves, and God knows how much excess for me. We've only got a couple years left at Hogwarts, let's do them right, okay?"

There was something down in his deep, clear eyes that shot an arrow to Sirius's heart, and he caved almost embarrassingly quickly. "Dude, Lupy, I promise. There's only so many times a guy can get his ass kicked at something before he just stops trying, you know?"

"Tell that to James," said Remus, nodding his head at their other friend, who was making goo-goo eyes at Lily down the table.

"Sorry?" said James, snapping back to attention at the sound of his name.

"Distraction. _Now_," Sirius said instead, and he slunk from the table as inconspicuously as possible in the direction of Dumbledore's office.

"RIGHT!" said James, bounding up onto the table and grabbing Remus's hand to drag him along too. "Ladies and gentlemen, there are many reasons why Gryffindor House is superior to all other Hogwarts houses, but the two biggest ones are standing right before you, prepared to display themselves in all their glory." With a wave of his wand, both his shirt and Remus's were gone, and Dumbledore, who'd been discussing a matter of some classwork with Professor Binns, whipped his head around to unabashedly stare.

Sirius, meanwhile, was darting through the halls under the Invisibility Cloak he'd borrowed from James, doing his best to avoid his stupid little brother and some of his Slytherin friends on their way down to a late dinner and Nearly Headless Nick floating at nearly neck high. The gargoyle at the bottom of Dumbledore's staircase was easy - this part he'd done seven or eight times. It was like trying to beat a level in a video game, where each time you'd still died but you'd made it a little further on, only it was much worse, because instead of dying you got detention. The trick stairs were easy enough too, and a quick _alohomora_ got the outermost lock out of the way. The inner ones were trickier and he had to go through a series of complicated miming gestures and sound effects to undo them, which the door almost didn't recognize because he was doing them invisibly. But finally, Sirius made it into the inner sanctum of Dumbledore's office, where he had only once before managed to get on his own.

"Geez," he muttered to himself, "wouldn't it be great if someday my kids - or like, James's kids - were good enough friends with Dumbledore that they'd get invited in here by choice instead of having to sneak in? What I wouldn't fucking give."

Not wanting to be encumbered in his search, Sirius discarded James's cloak, and immediately set to work looking for the Hat, Scarf, and other enchanted clothing. He was amazed the distraction was working for this long - he was beginning to formulate theories on where exactly the Scarf had placed their beloved Headmaster. He was throwing open cabinets that squawked in protest and digging through piles upon piles of rat-nibbled parchments and half-empty bags of candy (Dumbledore preferred Twizzlers? unacceptable!) when he found a key that was sort of...humming. There was a piece of string tied onto it and when he held it just by the string, without touching the key itself at all, it levitated straight out, toward a large wooden chest of drawers. Sirius followed the levitating key on its string - its _thread_, he realized suddenly - until it fitted into a lock on the chest and snapped it open easily.

"_Jackpot_," he hissed. If it were a video game, he would have been frantically hitting "Save."

Inside the chest were all sorts of enchanted magical accessories! There was a pair of gloves with a different letter on each finger, except for the thumbs - one hand read _E.N.F.P._ and the other _I.S.T.J._ He tossed those aside and kept rummaging. There was a pair of socks in his way, a red one and a blue one that nevertheless seemed to go together, and a big pile of Quidditch pads that hardly seemed enchanted at all. But there, at the back of the bottom drawer, Sirius encountered the Sorting Hat, and wrapped around its base in what almost seemed a ...loving?... manner was a thick, rainbow-striped scarf. There was nothing else that could possibly be.

Sirius snatched the Scarf of Sexual Preference up into his hand and went to drape it across his own neck...but something made him stop. And if he were truly honest with himself, he would be questioning the Hat's decision to Sort him into Gryffindor, because the thing that was making him stop was fear. Sirius had always gone in for pussy in the past. Girls were what he wanted and girls were what he liked. But this thing with Remus - well, it was like Remus's weirdness was rubbing off on him. Confusing up his head, and his dick too. Sirius didn't know if he was quite ready for the answer that the Scarf would give him.

Instead, he threw James's cloak back across his head and shoulders and scurried down the stairs, scarf tucked under his arm. He was nearly to the Gryffindor common room when he ran into someone in the hallway, sending both of them sprawling to the floor. The Cloak fell from him, the Scarf landed across his lap, and the other person turned out to be Remus, who was now wearing not just no shirt but also no pants, and sat before him stripped to the underwear, just like Sirius had often seen him after the full moon. Except not like that at all, because Sirius had seen that countless times and had never really cared about it. This time was completely different. This time, his breath still coming in pants after his frantic flight from Dumbledore's office and the really fucking gay scarf draped across his crotch, something about Remus just looked..._hot_.

"Put it on," he babbled, before he could help himself.

"What?" said Remus, still confused. "You mean you actually managed to get - "

"_Put it on!_" Sirius cried. It was suddenly the most important thing in the world. The tree that had grown from that tiny seed in at the end of fourth year was sprouting up through the top of Sirius's head.

"I thought you said this was for stupid Sour Grape Snape."

"Remus," said Sirius, holding the Scarf out to him. "Please."

Remus bit his lip, staring at the Scarf apprehensively. Sirius could see it on his gorgeous mustached face - something deep within Remus really, really didn't want to put it on. But his eyes flicked upward, locking onto Sirius's, and suddenly he knew. He wasn't afraid of it any more, like he had been back in Dumbledore's office. Remus Lupin was exactly like Gryffindor House - it wasn't where he'd ever thought of himself being, but now that he'd been shown it was an option, nothing in the world could possibly seem more _right_.

It was enough to make Remus drape the Scarf down around his shoulders, where it glibly announced, "Bisexual! But you curve pretty sharply, don't you Lupy?"

"I guess I do, Scarfy," said Remus, with a sad sort of smile on his face. "So there you go, Sirius," he told him. "Are you happy now?"

Sirius took the Scarf back from him, thought for a brief moment to, and then spoke, once he was sure he had adequately collected his thoughts. "Remus, you know how you never tell a girl you like her, because it makes you look like an idiot?"

"Yes, Sirius."

"What happens when you tell a _boy_ you like him? Do you still look like an idiot then?"

"Sirius - "

"Because I _like_ you, Remus Lupin. You're obsessed with chocolate and you can't really play Quidditch and you're a fucking werewolf, but I really, really like you. And I will like you no matter how weird you get, even if someday you end up homeless and I end up in jail and our lives totally suck."

"Sirius," said Remus, his cheeks flushing Gryffindor scarlet even as he protested, "Sirius you don't know what you're saying - "

The Scarf landed around his shoulders, and promptly proclaimed "Oh, you're just _greedy_!"

"Yeah," said Sirius, "I do."

Sirius took the Scarf by both ends and whipped it back around Remus's shoulders, using it to yank them closer together, so they were sitting on the floor practically in each other's laps. Then with the Invisibility Cloak thick on the floor beside them and his mouth tasting like the best snack in the world, Sirius Black shoved his lips down onto the lips of Remus Lupin, the weirdest kid he had ever met, the kid he'd stolen the Scarf of Sexual Preference for, the kid who had made one little seed in his mind sprout into a giant tree that was now unfurling big, bright flowers for the world to see.

They were still there, making out pretty hard against the floor, when Dumbledore found them, whining James in tow and gave all three of them a month's worth of detention.

-xxx-

"My _my_, but that was an adventure!" said the Scarf of Sexual Preference, ruffling its tassels back into place up in Dumbledore's office.

"I'm...glad you're back," said the Sorting Hat awkwardly. "I was worried about you."

"Oh Sorty, I'm a big boy, I can take care of myself!"

"I'm not so sure you can," said Dumbledore, pondering to himself. "If we don't take some sort of action on this, crazy shit like this might happen again. There's no telling what kinds of shenanigans a couple of psycho lesbians could get into if they take a leaf from Sirius Black's book!"

"But what can we do?" said the Sorting Hat.

"We erase all doubt, Scarfy," said Dumbledore. "We do exactly what we've been threatening to do since you first got here."

"But you can't mean - !" said the Scarf.

"Yep," said Dumbledore. "We'll just have to use you on every kid that comes through, too."

"Well, wait till the parents hear about this..."

-xxx-

Sirius Black: Greedy  
Remus Lupin: Bisexual with a sharp curve  
Peter Pettigrew: Needs to lower his standards  
James Potter: Heterosexual, but he'll try anything once  
Lily Evans: "Katy Perry"  
Severus Snape: Straight

-xxxfin.


End file.
